Welcome to Dodge Creek
by Olympia the Ocelot
Summary: Decades after the LW disbanded, American high schooler Edd Kirk must retrieve his sister, Emma, from the Digital Sea before their father returns home at the end of the summer, only to find her missing. With new friends, he'll discover the secrets that a revived XANA has kept hidden for years, and uncover what has remained unknown to even the most practiced of Lyoko's visitors.
1. Chapter 1

**Prologue**

* * *

Time passes. Many decades ago the group that was once known as the "Lyoko Warriors" left behind their life with the virtual world to pursue a new one, one as normal friends. They grew up, led their lives, and some even had kids. New friends were made, old ones faded into obscurity, but they stayed tied together by a common memory. Their lives went on with the generations, average to the inexperienced eye.

But who said XANA ever died? After all...

 _No good programmer forgets to back up his work._

Somewhere out there, there were copies of XANA's code, and for all that is known, made by XANA himself. Now, there are many tales to tell of the one who accidentally revived the virus, but they are for later.

For now, we open in the small town of Dodge Creek, Ohio, an area just outside of an almost equally small city near Lake Erie. In this town with the size of a small school district, it's a wonder something so similar to the Warriors' predicament could happen. The children at the local high school have uncovered a computer system reminiscent of the ancient factory complex's, of which exists across the ocean on the other side of the world, and completely unbeknownst to them.

A plan made by a force beyond their control is coming to fruition, so welcome to life for the teenagers of this town. This includes our focus, Edd Kirk, a little green-eyed boy whose family seems to be all but gone for now. A mom who knows where, a dad off in New York for a business trip, and a sister who has fallen from Lyoko.

Welcome to the cycle about to be broken by the people of this small town.

Welcome to Dodge Creek.

* * *

We've sworn to secrecy, that's why we're so careful when it comes to showing this place to new people. It's funny, really, because a lot of people our age in Dodge Creek actually know about it, but we all know that if someone ever tells the authorities or even just a teacher, it would mean the end for Lyoko. Sure, the teacher might think the person's joking at first, but you can't exactly joke so hard that you wish a subterranean supercomputer into existence under the sewer system.

The NSA or something could get involved, and some of us here kind of need the escape. No, not me, I'm fine, but this is something that I need to escape _from,_ if I may be so dramatic. My sister's stuck in there. We don't know where she is, let alone if she's even alive, but I'd rather stay optimistic.

From the old text files and voice logs that we found in the behemoth of a computer, we learned that there was another group of kids that had found this place before us, calling themselves the Lyoko Warriors. They had recorded their progress in finding more information on the code that made up this digital world and the conflict it had presented at the time. Their group was _far_ smaller than our own, though, seeing as how they only had six people at their highest point, while we have basically the entire student body of our school. Nevertheless, their tech know-it-all, who had gone by the name of Jeremie, had allegedly found a way to get people back from the Digital Sea — where Emma had fallen into. They claimed to have had succeeded, and when we get her out, I want to shut it all down, even if I have to do it myself.

A group of high school juniors and seniors had found this place back in April, completely by accident. In fact, whenever we talk about this place in the open, some people push for us to discretely call it by the nickname "April." Oh, are you going to April's house after school? Meet you at April's at five thirty! Hey, let's take a walk near April's. I don't use it because I think it's unnecessary, but I digress.

The story goes that they had been out biking on a Saturday afternoon near the edge of the woods when one of them, a senior named Alex Montag, got distracted and had fallen down a small ledge at the edge of the path they were riding. He found a stormwater drain, and the others instinctively got the _genius_ idea to go down there and explore the open tunnels. So, they went back to their houses, got some flashlights, snapped some branches off trees to defend themselves should any wild animals be hiding in the dark, and went in. An hour, a mother raccoon attack, and a kid bailing out later, they happened upon the room with what we would come to know as the Supercomputer and the scanners, the sooner standing in the center of the room and the latter ones being set up lazily in a semi-circle in the far right corner.

Of course, none of them really knew what it was or how to work it, so they talked to some techies from the advanced coding classes that Monday and tried convincing them to come back with them and help them work the mysterious computer they claimed they had found in the town's nasty drainage system.

Three had actually decided to come along, all juniors: Derek Almas, Kevin Marr, and Astrid Braun. The big group went back in that afternoon directly after school — luckily, there was no raccoon that time — and Derek went to work on booting up the devices. He failed to find any buttons to power it up near the main desktop, so he looked behind the comp and followed the massive wires and cords trailing behind it. They all led into a hidden server room next to the scanners set behind a thick, metal door that blended with the wall, where they, of course, found servers, but also a glowing mainframe on the back wall with a pull switch embedded in its sole compartment.

The other guy, Kevin, is rather rash, though, and flipped the switch before Derek could even confirm it wouldn't explode or something, but it ended up activating the power in the whole compound — the lab and the servers — instead. We would later come to know this place as the "Hideout." Kevin's still pretty smug about being the one to "officially" turn Lyoko on.

So there were a total of three main machines: the several rows of servers, the Supercomputer, and three "scanners."

Of course, Astrid couldn't keep a secret and spilled it to Emma through text messaging that night, and Emma, in turn, brought me along. Needless to say, the upperclassmen weren't too happy about us tagging up with them for their third exploration that Tuesday. Well, they were fine with Emma, since she was a junior too, but not for long after they had found out that she had brought a freshman with her, even if it was her brother, because apparently two grades makes a real big difference. I don't understand what the stigma was against freshmen; I'm glad I'm almost a sophomore.

Emma had figured that they didn't want too many people finding out and that it was kind of a slap in the face to bring friends of friends of friends. They probably didn't trust us to keep a secret after that, but the ironic thing is that us two, and even Astrid, weren't even the ones to get the rumor started about this place. It was mostly the seniors that chatted up the stories and got some more people to come, but I suppose like seniors do, and just like they convinced the code class kids, they miraculously have been managing to keep people pretty quiet about the whole thing. It was even Alex's idea to use the "April" thing as a code-name.

* * *

 **Chapter 1**

* * *

I jump in my sleep and wake up breathing heavily — I've had another night terror. I look over at my clock I have set on a stool next to my bed just as 6:29 turns to 6:30 and it begins beeping, and I attempt to wiggle off my blanket and try hitting at it to make it stop, but I'm still caught in my blanket and keep missing it. I fall out of bed, taking the stool down with me, and take the clock in both of my hands and repeatedly press the off button, but it won't turn off. I panic and frantically take the batteries out, throwing them at the wall, and moan, "Why do you do this every morning?" to the now blank inanimate object. Our cats, Charlie and Lance, see my struggle as their cue to come barreling into my room meowing and start fighting in the corner, presumably over who gets to annoy me more.

I slept in my shirt, start putting on my long shorts, grab a pair of socks, and head downstairs to turn the corner into our house's living room and into the kitchen. Lance is somehow already down here, sitting on Emma's chair with his ears back, chattering in an annoyed tone, like always.

"She's not back yet, you dense chatterbox," I tell him, but he doesn't get the message, and only gets louder. Charlie comes storming down from upstairs and tries jumping at Lance, only to fling himself too low and hit the bottom of the chair. He pops his head back up with a befuddled expression while Lance bats at his face, and I can't help but laugh a little. I walk through to the back of the kitchen, grab my jacket off my chair, and open up the resistant back door with the familiar scrap of metal and rubber on the frame. I fling up my hood as I mount my bike leaning against the side of my house and slowly take off into the cool summer morning towards the woods.

* * *

The Hideout is amazing. Everything glows with a golden light like that of an artificial sunrise, forming rays that glint off of the machines, and during the summer, especially now in early July when summer's just kicking into high gear, it's a buzzing hub of teenagers looking to have some fun, although not now at the abysmal time of six forty-five in the morning. It had declined for a little while when school had just let out in June and Emma fell into the digital sea, and it's almost offending that it's made a resurgence. There are a handful of kids — seniors — waiting near the scanners to be virtualized onto Lyoko, excited to see what awaits them for today, and yet others are relaxing off to the sides just hanging around.

The scanners are what confused our early group the most; the tall, empty cylinders of steel and copper looked like modernized coffins surrounded by wires and plugs, and we couldn't believe it when we discovered what they did.

Some of the other few freshmen here are giving me worried glances. They're here to get an early start on the fun, but everyone knows what I'm here for. A squad of them are friends of mine, Doug, Dillon, Martin, and Riley. They're not the closest of friends I have, but we know each other fairly well, well enough for them to worry for me. My closest friend, Lukas, is out on vacation to Germany to see relatives with his family right now, so I've mostly been on my own or talking with Emma's friends.

"Hey Edd, do you wanna sit down for a little while? We've got cold pancakes," one speaks up, optimistically. I turn around and see them looking at me eagerly, Dillon holding up a soggy-looking toaster pancake. They all laugh, Doug even slamming his face into the blanket he has on the floor, as Dillon explains, "I was going to heat them up last night and just eat them at room temp this morning, but my dad was downstairs all night and I fell asleep before I could sneak down and even get my hands on the toaster. They're all frozen, but I'm lucky I could get them at all!"

"...No, I'm fine, thanks," I murmur, much to their disappointment, and walk off to the Supercomputer that stands in the center of the room, attached to the inside of a concave, wall-like panel hanging from the ceiling, and the tall junior in gray sweatpants and a t-shirt standing at the keyboard.

Astrid's on comp duty this week, working the computer and making sure everyone stays safe. Can't be too careful after Emma's situation, not to mention that Astrid's taking this very personally. I tap her shoulder and she takes out her headset, only for it to get stuck in her long hair. She uses this headset to communicate with others; it helps her talk to almost anyone, whether they be someone already on Lyoko, one of the head seniors calling her about something important, or the system alerting her of a malfunction. She turns to me, the microphone still entangled in her hair, and her face brightens up a little, "Oh hey Edd, ya know I really oughta start wearing a ponytail. So, same place as yesterday?"

"Yeah, and I could use the Overboard this time around."

She nods and taps something on her keyboard, "Right," she hesitates a little before finishing. "Head on over to scanner one," she directs while pointing a finger at the far left tube. I notice her looking up at my curly, honey gold bedhead, and she cracks a joke half-heartedly, "and maybe run a brush through your hair next time, can't look too crazy for when you find her."

I manage a smile at that and sound back in agreement, not even sure myself of what I'm saying.

As I turn to go to the scanners tucked in the corner a couple yards away, I jump as she grabs my shoulder and has me face her again, "I'm coming with you this time, I'm sick of just waiting here while Emma's in there and you go it alone. I can set the Supercomputer to make a timed virtualization."

After that, she holds the mic of the headset back up to her mouth and she quickly speaks up to the people on the other end, "Hey, I need someone to take my place out here, I'm going in with a friend. Maybe you, Matt, you haven't exactly done much on comp this summer."

"Beats watching these guys taking all the glory out here," someone, likely Matt, responds from the other end.

I attempt to argue that she can stay, but Astrid doesn't exactly take no for an answer. I watch as she brings up the programs for virtualization and vehicles, and sets up four timers on the screen set to go off in ten seconds. She rushes off towards the tubes and I step into scanner two as she takes scanner one. The wait isn't long, and the tall sliding doors of sanded steel start to close almost immediately, first on Astrid, and then on me. The transfer process starts up as the cooling fans below the grated floor activate, and I close my eyes while my clothes blow back and forth around my waist and my small clumps of corkscrewed curls start to whip at my ears. My eyes are closed out of tiredness, but I've done this so many times by now that I know a light is traveling up and down the curves of the tube, scanning to see who's avatar to fetch from the mainframe. The scanning completes and I see the flashes of light through my closed eyelids as we make our shift to the virtual world.

* * *

I'm rendered onto Lyoko several feet above the ground with my arms stretched away from my body and my legs dangling together, suspended in the air for a brief second before I'm released from the invisible thread and my limbs become maneuverable again. I land on the balls of my feet with a thump, my hands hitting the ground in front of me to steady myself as I get up. Astrid comes down right after me with the clank of metal, and we greet one another and take a look at each other.

Lyoko, being a digital world, has uncanny graphical limitations. People here look like computer-generated animations, and there is very little skin detail; no one has their wrinkles or acne or even dimples carry over from the real world, and we don't even have fingernails. Our clothes don't carry over either, and our programmed avatars are equipped in spandex-like, full-body suits, unique to each individual and usually complete with weapons. We've found that those with no physical weapons on their person almost always have a weapon that they can call up with their power, although there are the rare few with no powers or weapons at all, much to their dismay, due to an anomaly in the code. A lot of people have both weapons and powers, like me with my halberd and cryokinesis.

My avatar's light gray clothing covers my entire lower body, but cuts off at the sleeves and goes halfway up my neck, I have smooth, blue pads covering my shoulders and knees, blue, segmented metal makes up my weighted boots, and a light blue strap keeps my silver halberd hanging from my back and a layer of light blue padding pressed against my thighs. Lyoko has a tendency to change your hair, too, so what was once a swirled wad of short, dangling curls are now clumps of short, downward-facing spikes.

Astrid's avatar bares much closer resemblance to her physical counterpart, with long, straight light brown hair and the only difference being a single yellow highlight going the length down one of her right locks. Her attire is styled differently than mine — her skin is covered all the way down to her feet and elbows with pale yellow spandex, and plates of silver metal completely encase her shins and feet, with a few also partially protecting her hips and upper chest. There are little engravings of golden circuit designs on the plates that snake up from the edges.

We look around at our surroundings. She's put us in sector four, the Mountains, just like I always go to on my searches. The terrain is made up of dull purple monoliths shaped like falling globules of water that float in suspension over the Digital Sea, and the whole area remains shrouded in a sheet of mist, especially near the many distant peaks. Wide, flat connections of arced stone join the hilly platforms and spires, making it appear like a floating fortress of paths. This was Emma's favorite sector — it was where she went the most, and the place that she got shot into the Sea.

"Is anyone else in the Mountains?" I whisper.

"Everyone who happens to be up as of now was virtualized into sector three, and I doubt that slowpoke Matt got to a tower quick enough to get out and put other people in, so we should be alone. How come you're whispering? You worried someone will hear us talking or something? We're not hiding anything."

"No, I think I'm just still waking up," I say as I rub my eyes. "Sector three, that's the Desert, right?"

"No, the Forest. Who in their right mind would want to be in the desert smack dab in the middle of summer?"

Not even a moment later do two other objects start to appear, floating just inches over the rocks. The identical Overboards begin as the white, three-dimensional grid of their form that slowly fills in the framework of vector lines with colors and textures. They finish loading within a few seconds and they finally look like what I'm used to: sleek, deep indigo hoverboards with a square of black gripping in the center, stout fins protruding up from the sides, and little silver thrusters embedded on of each side. The Overboards bob down ever so slightly as we step up onto them, a warm glow like the shimmering of a summer heat haze escaping from the thrusters as they power on, and then we lift off and we're off across the sector.

The barren Mountains have plenty of open air, but there are countless hollows and cave entrances scattered on the larger islands. Placed methodically across the entire sector are ten tall towers, perfect, white cylinders only interrupted in their opacity by what looks like dense bubbles and clots of black ivy, and shrouded in a halo of cyan smoke.

They're like this in every sector, and should you walk through them to the inside, they hold vast quantities of easily accessible data and computing power from the internet — think of it somewhat as a digital communication access within the servers that run Lyoko — but the tower that we're going to, just like I do every morning to noon, is special. It's called a Way Tower, and while the other nine normal towers serve as connections to things like websites and communications with the real world, not to mention a method by which to send and receive data like any average desktop computer, Way Towers hold information of the sector itself; information like the sector's virtualization history, changes in the other towers' statuses, and even a complete readout of the couple hundred thousand paragraphs of coding that comprise the entirety of the Mountains. They also hold the one true connection between all other towers and the Digital Sea, and without them, all other towers would be rendered useless. I've been hoping that I'll finally find data on how to bring Emma back, or at least find where she is and what's happening to her.

The thing about the towers is that we're not the only ones that are able to use them. As Astrid and I pass by one, I think of one of the first logs we ever found in the Supercomputer, an audio of a girl describing a programmed hostility in the system:

 _"We've discovered what's been causing the strange attacks near our town in the past few days: a part of the Supercomputer that was awakened when we powered it on. 'X—A—N—A,' or just 'XANA,' is a malevolent program, which can control the electricity and circuitry of seemingly anything, but in order to attack us, it needs to activate towers on Lyoko to gain access to our world. We've started to refer to XANA as a 'he,' out of simplicity. He seems to be a neural-network-based learning AI with an unjustified lust to destroy."_

There weren't very many of the logs — there were just enough to give us the basics of how to work Lyoko — but from what we've gathered, 'XANA' was once much stronger, malevolent, and capable of learning back then, and had been a major conflict as the Warriors tried to materialize a virtual girl into our world. Besides that, they left their story relatively vague to us.

Attacks of the nature described have been happening to us recently, although nothing serious; they can't even be considered "attacks" when the worst they've done is fry some outlets or power down a scanner, and the only way we know that they're technically "attacks" and not just technology being technology is because some of the kids have noticed that when an "attack" is launched, a tower on Lyoko becomes "activated" and the smoke halo around it turns red, but it always deactivates itself after an hour or so.

Really, the only presence XANA has is that he has a tendency to create hostile creatures for Lyoko, like human-height blocks on legs or these pathetic knee-height things called Kankrelats that look like a stumpy, wingless cockroach, but _really_ , the worst they do is shoot lasers at you with bad aim, likely due to their lack of eyes, and try to hit you until you get a forced devirtualization. They have obvious weak points, too, each monster having a symbol that we've come to call "the Eye of XANA" right on their front that looks like a three-ringed target. Visitors like it, though, seeing as how they're supposedly no threat, despite a Block being the thing that shot Emma into the Sea, and they add a bit of life to the animal-less landscape, not to mention a bit more action.

We're flying side by side now on our Overboards, just going around an extensive mound of floating stone and almost in sight of the Passage Tower, when a strange winged creature flies by in front of us with a resonant buzzing, almost making me lose my balance.

"Astrid! You saw that?"

"Yeah," she giggles, "it looked like a massive bee! I saw the 'Eye' on it; must be a new 'monster.' Great to see XANA's innovating for once."

I watch as the creature flies far to our left to a tower where a small group of four or five more are gathering. They swarm in the air, seemingly following an unseen entity, until I notice something slowly walking into the wall of the liquid tower: a person, dressed all in black, with no skin on their body showing but their fingers and presumably their face, which is turned away from us and already halfway into the tower.

"Astrid, I thought you said no one was in the Mountains."

"There shouldn't be. Why, did you see someone?"

"Yes, walking into the tower over there, where the bugs are swarming!"

"Well then, we better go check it out," she instructs as we steer down to the tower in pursuit. We cautiously step off of our vehicles, and even as we push inside, the eyeless insects remain unresponsive, aimlessly staring at the tower and its mystery occupant.

The inside is familiar: a circular, azure floor with a white Eye stretching across the whole of it, and deep blue walls of glittering lights and traveling binary code, but there we find that there's no one inside.

* * *

 **Next chapter May 1st, now bear with me on this wild road that I'm presenting, guys.**

 **I wish for the reader to roast me viciously on my bad grammar, spelling, and tense/POV shifts should they present themselves; I wish to improve my work if there is a problem.**

 **This is somewhat based on a post made on the CodeLyokoHeadcanons Tumblr blog submitted by an anonymous user:** "No good programmer forgets to back up their work. Somewhere out there, there's still disks containing XANA's code, either made by Hopper or by XANA itself," **so yeah, I guess we can thank that.**


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter 2**

* * *

"Astrid, this is getting on my nerves. What did you see, Edd?"

"A person dressed all in black, from the neck down, sleeves and all. Their head and half their torso were already through the tower wall, but it was definitely a girl — very feminine figure — and you'll say I'm crazy, because I know this is considered a cliché, but I know it was Emma."

"Why black? Emma had a gray outfit like you, so how do you know this wasn't just another kid in the sector?"

"Because she disappeared! It's gotta mean _something,_ it's abnormal! And I swore I saw her sword at her hips."

"And Derek, no one else was in the sector at the hour, everyone I had already put in was in sector three," Astrid adds.

"Oh really?" he answers doubtfully. "And where was this?"

"We were in the Mountains, on our way to the Way Tower-"

"He means specifically," Astrid says as she puts her hand on my shoulder. "I think that it was tower five, the one just over a rise near coordinate set two."

"Yeah," I continue, "I saw her after the new monster flew by us while we were on our Overboards, so we went down. I had just gone into the tower with Astrid right behind me. There's no way Emma went out another side without us noticing, but the inside was still empty. We even took the lift to the upper floor; nothing. In fact, when we looked down, the wasp things were gone, our Overboards, too. Derek, you have to believe me."

Derek pauses, runs his hand through his dark hair while leaning against the outside of the scanner, thinking. "Well to start," he begins, "did you ever _get_ to the Way Tower? You could use the panel to search up today's history in the Mountains. It's probably not even her, after all, you have to wonder how she would've gotten back up on the surface; there's a big gap between the last few platforms and the Sea, but feel free to check."

I don't like Derek. I know that he's technically the person with the most experience, but I still don't like him. Not even sure why, to tell the truth. Maybe I think he's entitled, maybe he's intimidating; his voice always ends with a quiet room.

Astrid breaks the silence, though. "Thanks then, we'll go back in."

"Bring Matt and Kevin with you," he says as he starts over to the chatty dirty blonde sitting on a plastic chair at the Supercomputer, and the auburn with abnormally long hair hunched over him who's holding his sides, practically fainting from laughter. I've met them before — both are junior-soon-to-be-senior, "I need a reliable witness this time. I've got the comp covered," he shews the two away as he takes the seat, "I want to see the user tag on the screen myself, assuming it really turns out to be Emma. Go on over and I'll pop you in."

"Why don't you just come in yourself?" I challenge.

"I don't have the time. I've gotta get back to my house in time to leave to see a relative up in the city, and the drain tunnel's a whole thirty minutes to trek through before it empties out at the ledge in the woods. I shouldn't even really be here, but you had to call me down, now hurry it up and get in the scanners!"

Astrid does so begrudgingly, Matt and Kevin behind her, and I follow after exchanging stares with Derek.

"Dibs on first group," Kevin states as he steps in front of me on my way to take my place in scanner three.

I don't even argue. "Fine, then, go ahead."

"Hey kid, don't take that, just wrestle him out of the way," Matt instructs as he makes a pushing motion with his hands. He leans out of the tube and looks over at scanner three, smiling and raising his eyebrows, as if to signal to something. "Kevin's got no manners."

"Ah yes, how rude of me, ladies first," and Kevin steps out and waves his hands flamboyantly at me to step up inside.

"Whatever works for you," I say as I accept and pass him.

We're ready and waiting, with Kevin standing nearby for when the scanners open back up, and Derek's at the console with the headset on, when he shouts over to us, "I'm sending you guys to set five instead this time, it's closer!"

To my left in scanner two, I hear Astrid mutter, "Yeah, by like ten yards… the Way Tower's practically right in the middle of the two."

Derek hears, but ignores her, closing the scanners and starting up the manual virtualization process. "Transferring Matt," I hear him say through a small speaker at the roof of the scanner, "transferring Astrid, transferring erroneous lunatic."

"Derek, _stop,"_ Astrid shouts, irritably. There must be microphones in the scanners, too. I've never noticed that.

"How in the world," Matt adds, "did I ever convince such a skeptic to give into following us to the Hideout all those months ago?"

"Scanning all. Virtualization."

* * *

Once again, we float in the air of Lyoko, our bodies momentarily stuck in the T-pose before we drop down and land on our feet. Well, not all of us. Matt ends up losing his balance the moment he touches the ground, landing on his face.

"Smooth, Matt, bet you get a bunch of chicks with that move."

"Yeah, Astrid?" he asks sarcastically as he picks himself up. "Well, just don't you dare tell Kevin when he gets on in, he'll never let me hear the end of it."

From somewhere simultaneously in our heads and from the sky, snarky speaking comes through to Lyoko, "Too late, Derek had it on speaker. I heard your fall in its full glory."

"Shut it, Kevin, and get back over in the scanner," I hear Derek bark in his low voice.

"Jeez, you're really in a bad mood today, aren't you?"

"We're on the clock, Astrid, thirty minutes and I'm outta here. Kevin and two Overboards are on their way."

"Looks like we'll have to double up then, Edd."

"Ladies' man!"

"Kevin, I swear to god, I will make sure you get virtualized right over a lake in the Arctic if you don't get your behind in the forsaken oversized test tube! I'm turning off the speaker mode," and then we hear the faint, muffled static of the Supercomputer's speakers being switched off in exchange for the headset's mic. "Checking. Kevin's getting in the scanner, you'll see him in a bit. The boards are being sent in."

Before us spawn in the two purple Overboards, floating once more above the gray, faintly purple plateau we stand on. I look around while we wait on Kevin. The area around us looks like utter chaos. The land is clumped together, with the floating pathways randomly intersecting each other, and sheer cliff faces, crags, and natural stone stairways and ramps form from the countless colliding blocks. They cast shadows down into the mist-shrouded crevasses and caves down below where they fade from view and disappear, and standing weakly in a few of the rock piles are scraggly little 'trees,' and on them are 'growing' at the tips of their few branches green balls that supposedly represent leaves.

"Edd, get on up here awhile," Astrid says while standing on the right vehicle, breaking me out of my daze. She shifts towards the front, her bulky shin armor clinking against itself; it bobs up and down as I hop onto it's back.

"Ugh, I hate the Mountains," Matt says as he strolls over and sits on his board. "It always feels humid here."

"Virtualization."

We collectively turn our heads upwards and we see Kevin finally forming up in the air as his avatar. The digital mesh of vector lines fill in with his form and he falls to the ground from his static pose, landing in a squatting position. I've never seen Kevin on Lyoko before, admittedly, and his look takes me somewhat by surprise. Given, I've never seen Matt either, but Kevin looks particularly strange.

While his hair looks the same as real life — long, droopy, and auburn — his suit is a dark red or maroon color, and abstract lines of cyan blue run along every section of it, from his wrist-reaching sleeves to the torso to the legs, where they met up with his boots. His boots aren't bulky and metallic like mine, they're slender, nearly knee-length, and have a visual texture like rubber. They're the inverse of his suit, cyan being the central color and straight maroon lines streaking downward until they reach the heel. He stands and scans around, focusing on his right towards the landscape near us. I've never bothered to look at his real eye color — I assume they were brown or a color dull or dark enough to blend with his pupils since they didn't stand out enough to me for me to notice — but his _eyes_ of all things are the ones to change color on Lyoko, and they look an unnatural shade of bright orange.

He turns arms crossed and pokes fun at Matt, who's now stood up on the front of the left Overboard, "Ah, and here on the runway is Matt Mensen, strutting his stuff in his signature adornment, a manly kimono."

Matt's outfit doesn't actually look much like a kimono, really, except maybe the green cloth belt strung around his waist. His suit is completely sleeveless with a short neck being the thing mostly attaching it to him; he has no footwear, as the white spandex just goes all the way down to cover his feet.

"Oh, shut it, it's an obi,"

"Reaffirming my belief that you are a complete wee-"

"AND, it's essentially just a big sash. I don't have some full-on robe, get over it."

Kevin smiles mockingly. "You're such a nerd, though. How can I control my urge to tease that?" He glances over towards me and Astrid, notices I'm staring at his form, and makes an unnerved face. "What're you gawking at, kid?"

"He's probably looking at the clown that looks like he belongs in some _sci-fi disco."_

"I can't help what I look like, and at least it's not boring like yours. Two colors? Come on, step it up, man, we're in a virtual world, even Astrid's ugly yellow monochrome has some armor to mix it up a bit."

"Hey, leave me out of this."

Derek cuts in again, "Guys. On task. _Now_ maybe? Twenty-five minutes."

"Don't blow a fuse, Derek," Kevin taunts, "we're going."

He doesn't waste any time getting up behind Matt, and we don't waste time ascending into the air.

"The Way Tower from there is... southeast."

"Do we look like we can tell what direction that is? We don't exactly have a map," Astrid points out.

"The map shows an area where the pathways become just about the only thing in the sky, and some of them are broken up a bit, that's southeast. In fact, following those paths should lead you directly to it. They all eventually converge into each other and the path that forms from them looks to lead straight to the tower. You'll know it when you see it."

"Over there in distance," I inform, facing behind me.

"Nice eye. Okay, Derek, we're on track, we'll make good time," Astrid speaks to the sky.

"Good, there're some sophomores in sector three that have been trying to contact me over and over again," and at that, he clicks off from our line.

Astrid picks up speed and leans to the right to turn the vehicle around, and I hold onto her torso to keep my balance. With Matt and Kevin close behind us, we soar over the pathways. The two are whooping behind us, going wild and getting dangerously close to the ground. At one point they grind their board up against a swath of floating spikes shaped vaguely like a half-pipe.

"I swear, those things only last when those two use them," she kids, acknowledging their unruliness, and we both laugh to ourselves.

"Look, there are Kankrelats up there," I point out, nodding towards the horde of ochre-colored spots blocking the area where the paths are starting to form together.

"Oh jeez, that's a lot, looks like a little under ten, but they're Kankrelats, we can take them." She faces back to Matt and Kevin, who are somehow standing upside down on their board, "Okay, you jokers get ready, there're some monsters up ahead."

"Oh please," Kevin says, arms crossed, from behind Matt as they flip their Overboard back into the upright position, "those things aren't any trouble, we can just fly over them. If it comes down to it we can just run up kick them over the edge."

Matt adds in, "Yeah, and if they _do_ happen to land on another chunk after falling off, the drop will probably be too far for them to survive. They're not all that durable, after all."

Kankrelats, the weakest monsters on Lyoko by far. They're about a foot tall and wide, and look like short, pudgy roach larvae but with stubby, rounded metal legs. They're eyeless, and instead have a red hole where blasts of lasers come from and a black imprint of the Eye of Xana just above said hole. Even with lasers, they're not much of a threat, as they need a charge time, and even then, they're extremely inaccurate.

From behind, we all start hearing the bubbly flapping of insect-like wings. Sure enough, coming up from behind floating boulders and arced paths are over ten of the legless, eyeless, ugly Hornets with the Eye on their head. We lean to the side to stop and stare at the monsters.

"Those are the new monsters we saw!" I yell over to the others. "They didn't attack us before, so we don't know what they can do."

Astrid stares specifically at Kevin with a hard look and raised eyebrow, and adds, "Yeah, be careful, or you might fall over the side of the paths if you don't pay attention. I don't need another faller on my watch."

"Ya' see? This is what Derek is supposed to be doing: telling us when a bunch of bugs are waiting to ambush us instead of having us on mute." Kevin clenches his fists together and cracks his knuckles. "But alright then, let's do this." He moves a hand over the side of his fist and begins drawing the hand away, materializing something with snaps of cyan dust, and from the opening near his index finger comes a blade as a hilt forms from the side near his pinkie. As he readies himself, the weapon spirals forth — a thick, metal arming sword split thinly in half, creating the sight of two separate, one-sided blades close to each other on a single bright blue hilt. "Astrid, bring them down to a level I can hit them at," he says.

"Got it," she responds, and she hops off of the board onto the ground, extending one of her arms outward, putting the other to her temple. "Matt, take cover behind Edd, and Edd you better provide it!"

Matt runs behind me and takes cover to my left under one of the only rocks attached to the paths and not floating in the air. I back up closer to him, confused, and gently ask, "Why aren't you in there? Are your powers dependant on something?"

"No, I don't have any. Not even something simple like speed. It sucks."

"So you're one of those anomalies…" I note.

I keep my focus back to the skirmish, pulling my halberd off my back. Astrid's out on the field using telekinesis to pull the now firing Hornets out of the surrounding air and down to the ground for Kevin to smash. Occasionally, I need to deflect a stray laser fired at me from the stinger of one of the Wasps, or from the Kankrelat that wandered too far from the group up ahead that is now slowly trying to advance on us.

I leave the rock and Matt for a split second to take the Kankrelat out, my weapon's blade outstretched to my right. I run up to it and fling the light blade up over my head to slice it down its center when a fluorescent cyan ball of bubbling flames from behind me strikes it instead, leaving its legs standing almost comically before they collapse.

I look over to find Kevin holding his still glowing hand open towards what used to be the roach, and then he folds it in, giving me a finger gun, "Chill kid, I gotcha."

"Take on your own bugs, the bodyguard had this," shouts Matt.

"It doesn't hurt to have extra protection, oh sheltered one," he retorts.

"We're done over here anyway," Astrid says, walking back over to our board. "Let's get going or Derek will get ticked off again, we can ignore the Kankrelats."

I nod, and we run over and hop back onto our boards, and in seconds we're skipping right over the Kankrelats and back on our way.

As we travel, the paths are converging, and before we know it, we can see an intersection where other paths meet up. Once we get to that, I can see the cup-shaped barrier of solid stone walls that surround the blue-shrouded Way Tower on its lone island connected to its lone path.

"Here we are, then," I say.

"Yeah," Astrid goes along somberly. "Let's hope it's her.


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter 3**

* * *

Inside the cracked walls of the natural barrier, Astrid and Matt stop the Overboards and we get off. We walk up to the Way Tower, and although familiar to me by now, is a sight to them — it's far wider and taller than the normal towers, and its black ivy clots are thicker and more numerous. I run towards it instantly, and I hear the others scurry from behind to catch up with me. I run towards the ivy and through the wall into the room—one exactly like the normal towers, but wider—the massive white Eye on the deep blue, solid floor lighting up ring by ring as I enter. Excitement and anticipation course through me as I think if this will lead to my sister after a full month.

Astrid comes up behind me, and right away she goes to the second ring and faces inward towards the center dot, triggering the tower to present the misty blue touch panel made of static before her. I come up next to her and lean in beside her shoulder, the two boys doing the same on her other side, and she opens a list on the screen:

 **Kevin - Virtualized**

 **Edd - Virtualized**

 **Astrid - Virtualized**

 **Matthew - Virtualized**

And so on. It was the list of this sector's virtualization history. Astrid swipes upwards, scrolling down slightly to two hours earlier, when I swore I saw _her_. Instead of Emma's name, like I had expected, I see a disappointing surprise—a strange name I've never heard mentioned before:

 **Angerona - Currently Offline**

Kevin leans in and says, in a dumbfounded way, "I'm just gonna say what everyone's thinking: what the actual heck."

"Yeah, do you guys know anyone named that?" Astrid asks.

We all deny it.

In all of our heads, we hear a clicking, and then Derek's voice again, "Hey, are you guys done yet?"

"Um," I hesitated, "yes and no. We found out the name of the girl. It's not my sister, it's someone named... 'Angerona?'"

"You mean like the place in West Virginia?" he questions.

"Yeah, I guess, do you guys have someone named that in the higher grades?"

"If I recall, no," he says. "Click their name for their profile."

"On it," Astrid says, tapping on 'Angerona.' All of a sudden, Astrid shrieks and recoils from the screen, shaking her hand in pain. It's sending out a halo of electric shocks, and instead of opening a profile, the static-ridden screen has turned completely black with a white Eye flashing on it, the panel blinking with random colors as if it was an old, broken monitor that had been hit too hard with a metal tool. It falters before completely dispersing back into thin air. "Oh my god!" she shouts at it, and the tower's occupants all go into a frenzy.

As I go to cover my ears, someone shouts, "Edd, you go here a lot, is that normal?!"

I fail to find words in the heat of the panic, "I, well... no- it-. No! Does this seem normal to anyone?!"

"What are we gonna do about this?!" Matt yells.

" _Derek_ ," Astrid barks upwards, "we kinda need you right now!"

Kevin starts babbling off to the side, "Oh god, oh god, oh Jesus Christ, it's intelligent, XANA's stepping it up. It's evolving!"

"I'm not ready for Skynet to take over the world yet," Matt screams, "I haven't prepared my bunker for terminators!"

Kevin grabbed Matt's shoulders and started shaking him. "I can't take this; the logs lied! They couldn't destroy him, they didn't weaken him, he's still out to get us!"

Astrid snaps her head upward, yelling at the sky, "Kevin's having a meltdown! Derek!"

"Yeah, stop whining, I can hear you all, be quiet," and his command results in just that. "Whatever you're freaking out about now doesn't matter compared to what just popped up. There's a weird tag on my map, someone check it out."

"Emma?" I ask.

"No, it's not a user tag."

"A group of Hornets?" Matt asks, still freaking out. "I don't feel like dealing with those again."

"You're not exactly the one who had to deal, oh sheltered one," Kevin says, still quivering, in a mocking tone.

"It's just one thing by itself. The tag calls it… I don't know, something in _Spanish_ of all things."

Kevin whips his head up, too, suddenly alert. "Aren't you Venezuelan?" he argues.

"...Ancestrally. Just go take a look."

"Matt, go out there," Kevin instructs.

"Why me?"

"Because you're literally our human shield."

"Just now you were calling me the 'sheltered one.'"

"Well now you're the sacrificed one, go take a look."

Derek speaks up, "We already know that it's not Emma, just go take a look, Matt. If the single line at the top of the Eye is north, it's directly at the south wall, where you all came in."

Kevin gets behind Matt and pushes him up to the wall, and 'helps' him through the side of it. It's not long, though, before an inhuman shriek like that of grinding metal is heard through the thick wall of blue, and in a blast of red, Matt is flung back into the tower, throwing Kevin to the ground with him. His chest is smoking above his cloth belt, and his eyes keep falling in and out of focus on the room around him as he lays in dizzy shock.

"Matt, you've sustained forty percent damage already," Derek announces. "Whatever's out there must be pretty insane. Did you happen to see it?"

"Uh… ah, yeah," Matt mutters as he struggles to get up, even with Astrid helping him. "A big termite... or spider, or… something."

While still lying on the floor, Kevin states blankly, "That's a pretty big difference between the two."

"Choose one," Derek says through the mic.

"Well it screamed at me then shot me, so I couldn't exactly take a good look, now could I? It had some white on it I guess, if that helps, and if it _really_ helps you," he adds snidely, "I could pop my head back out there and try again to see if I can add to your police sketch before I die."

"I hate to interrupt the lovely couple," Astrid cuts in, "but how about you actually spell out the name on the tag?" Astrid smiles to herself, proudly. "I know a bit of Spanish."

"I get the feeling a Spanish II class won't help you here, Astrid."

"Just man up and spell it."

"Fine then. T, A, R, A, N, T, U, L, E."

"'Tar-anne... too-lay?'"

"If you say so."

"Hmm."

"You don't know, do you?"

There's a menacing, awkward silence, and I can feel the two of them giving each other a death stare across both worlds. Then Matt chimes in, "You twats, that's French. You pronounced it wrong, but even then it sounds just like 'tarantula.'"

There's an even longer silence on Derek's end, and I see Kevin to the south side, still on the floor, face red, barely managing to contain his laughter. As he's on the verge of bursting, Derek finally speaks. "Oh," he says simply. I can hear his embarrassment through the speaker, and it's strangely satisfying. It's kinda like schadenfreude.

Kevin finally bursts out in a fit of laughter, "Wow, outmatched Derek, did you? You win the Nobel prize, Matt!"

"I get the feeling you don't really know what that is, at least partially because you never pay attention in social studies," he comments back.

On Derek's side, I can hear him begin to put his hand on the mic. "...Hold that thought," he says as he clicks off. We wait a few seconds, and he comes back on. "Never mind, just another activation; a group of freshmen saw a red tower."

"Hmm, where?" Astrid asks cautiously. "XANA seems like he's getting stronger, so this could be potentially dangerous; we might need to do something about it."

"Sector two, Desert, but I need to head back in fifteen minutes, so it's really not worth it. One of you also needs to be on comp, so you might as well use Code Earth and leave while you're in the tower. That program for materializing back into the scanners with input directly from the lab keeps eluding me…."

"No way, I wanna knock out whatever's out there!" Kevin announces in an overly confident tone, shortly before running through the east wall with all the rashness in the world.

"Kevin?!" Astrid shouts in anger. "You know what? Come on Edd, if we're gonna be devirtualized, might as well go down trying something new," and she stomps up to the west wall.

We sneak out the side and inch around bit by bit, until we spot Kevin hovering in the air on his Overboard at the southeast side, dodging a barrage of rapid-fire laser shots coming from the new beast. The creature is bulky, taller than a human, and longer than it is tall. It has the form of a strange, thin spider with only four legs and a white, almost floppy head. Its face is eyeless, and on its head is the Eye; looks like XANA has a bit of a theme he likes. It sits in a crouching position with one leg under its abdomen and the other upright, balancing it. The front two are what are firing the lasers at the airborne kid—they look to have metal stubs at the firing ends.

"Okay, I'm gonna lift you up, and I need you to be ready to land and kill that thing," Astrid tells me, and I nod to it. She trails off as she concentrates and positions her hands on her head again, "…Alright, hit it right in the head…."

I feel her telekinesis taking effect, picking me off of my feet by my waist's padding with a white glow. I ready my halberd from my back, and she flings me at the monster's backside. I grab onto its head by the snout and it slams down its shooting appendages, letting out that awful scream and whipping its head about as I wrap my legs around its neck and attempt to swing down. I miss, puncturing its side instead, exposing its digital vector lines. It lurches and flings me off as I lose grip on the staff of my polearm, and I'm thrown high, impacting high up against the Way Tower's side and tumbling down before it strikes me with a blast of the same strength that shot Matt back into the tower.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Kevin launch a ball of his fizzling bubbles and hit it dead on. It lets out one last continuous scream and it collapses, its legs sprawled out. The spider shatters into bits and pieces of itself with an explosion and starts to disintegrate, defeated.

Kevin starts hovering down on his board and jumps to the ground, his discordantly-colored boots landing firmly as he squats on the balls of his feet. "Nice, and I only got hit twice," he boasts. He stands and points a thumb at the spot the monster's disappearing from, "I think whatever hit Matt so hard was a charged beam, because nothing this thing dished out ever hit me _that_ hard."

From the Way Tower's west side, Matt comes rushing out with a worried expression on his face. He pants out, arms raised at his sides and eyes wide as if startled, "Did you three hear that?!"

"Yeah, this ugly guy couldn't keep quiet!"

"No, Kevin, no, not that. It's Derek, I heard him yelp and then it cut out to static and now it's just quiet! I can't get his attention. Didn't you guys hear it?"

"We were… occupied, to say the least," I say, nodding back to where the creature used to be.

"Ay Derek!" Kevin shouts up to the sky, suddenly serious. "If you don't speak up already, I'll take your laptop and chuck it into the woods, better yet, the creek! I thought you said that we don't have time for this bull!"

No response.


End file.
